To answer that question we first need to have a look at the way software is developed and maintained further down the road. After that you will hopefully understand that installing updates is a ‘conditio sine qua non’ or a must for you to do on any devices you have.
When software is developed, it is usually quite methodical, meaning that there are coding rules to follow, a bit like a ‘standard’ way how to develop. There will be different processes in place to standardize the way that the developers develop. One of these process is called ‘error handling’. This error handling is a difficult and lengthy process because the developers need to guess what can go wrong and define an error handling procedure in all of those cases. Can you imagine having to think about how can a end user make the software crash?
Software bugs and vulnerabilities
If an application is not prepared to handle a specific situation, what is will do is rather unpredictable. It can go two ways: the application can crash or it might work in a different way than the developers thought it would. Both of them will be called a bug.
On the other hand you have vulnerabilities. A vulnerability is a weakness that attackers find in the code to abuse application for malicious intend. They might be able to become an administrator inside of the application which will make it easier for them to look to and extra data from the application or even from other servers in the network.
Getting into an application and make it crash is also an attack, called a DOS (denial of service) attack. Imagine your company’s website to be down and their online shop not being able to sell products to customers. Most of these attack are executed by different machines on the internet, making is a DDOS, Distributed Denial Of Service attack. The last one is more difficult to mitigate as is would involve sources to block.
Vendors really work hard to resolve both of the problems described here. They roll out bug fixes and security updates to keep the applications stable and secure at the same time.
One and only one take away!
Updating your applications and OSses is crucial to protect you from being attacked or being taken down. Please update them regularly.
Beta versions
Some software developers release beta releases. These are releases that are not available to the public yet, and that you need to acknowledge the risks before you can install them. Be aware that beta versions will also contain, the extra features aside, new bug and vulnerabilities.
Be very aware about this risk before you install beta updates!
